Tony Huggins in Party Mode - circa 1990
Tony Huggins in His Office - circa 2004
Tony Huggins retired from the Francis Marion University English Department last spring after spending most of his career there. We're still feeling the aftershocks of his sudden death by heart attack on January 9 while with his wife Marion on the beach near their Pawleys Island house. This was all the more stunning given Tony's fitness, his regular cycling, walking, and running. I put out a request to our department and various people formerly at FMU for written memoirs about Tony. 20 people responded, and with the help of Beckie Flannagan, I put them together in a bound album for Marion. Here's the piece I wrote about Tony:
I knew Tony before I knew anyone else at Francis Marion College. We both took Carolyn Matalene’s Composition Theory class at USC in 1983 and often went to the Humanities Building café for coffee afterwards. I had just enrolled in a Ph.D. program, while Tony was commuting from Darlington twice a week, taking courses toward his own degree. Right off, I admired Tony’s intelligence coupled with his finely-tuned bullshit detector. If he thought a reading assignment was off-base--or didn’t square with his teaching experience-- he said so and didn’t mind explaining why.
We became friends partly because we were the oldest students in the class but also because we were both graduates of Davidson College and had that background in common. I discovered that he had maintained a close friendship with Douglas Houchens, one of my Davidson art professors. Although our years at Davidson didn’t quite overlap, we shared numerous memories and acquaintances. From the outset, Tony was evasive about his post-undergrad activities in the sixties when he was involved in military intelligence, but he told me all about his weekend at Woodstock in 1969.
Arriving at Francis Marion for a job interview in 1989, I was eager to talk with Tony. In those days, job candidates were subjected to a gauntlet of small-group interviews in faculty offices, along with meetings with the Department Chair, the President, and the Vice President for Academic Affairs (now the Provost). For my interview in Tony’s office, I stood up the whole time; there was no room to sit down. Nath Dresser was there, and the three of us had a good conversation about music. I decided Francis Marion was a place I could settle into.
Tony always loved talking about music, art, film, and literature. He had little patience for anything that distracted him from those fundamental interests. Even when our paths crossed in the gym locker room, we wound up talking about Raging Bull or Mystic River, Atonement or The Lovely Bones.
Tony’s well-formed opinions about teaching, and his skepticism about composition assessment—in fact, his skepticism about many classroom practices—were often maddening. He had the audacity to ask why we were collecting data in this way or that, to ask how we knew our test results were valid. He would ask why this book was preferable to that one, why it was important to collect student portfolios. Tony was a gadfly, and his querulous manner drove me crazy, especially when I chaired the Freshman Writing Committee. But underlying this attitude was a desire for rigor, an aversion to wasted effort, and a commitment to serving our students well.
Tony’s real value to the Department came out during interviews with job candidates. When the rest of us were tossing softballs to our prospective colleagues, Tony would wind up and throw a nasty curve that just nicked the outside corner of the plate. The interviewee would invariably look startled as if to say, “Where did that come from?” The good ones could handle it. Those who struck out wound up looking for work elsewhere.
Tony once did us the great favor of asking a modern drama candidate to name her favorite Arthur Miller play (not exactly a curve ball). When she paused for agonizing seconds and responded, “The Iceman Cometh,” it was game over for her, and we went on to hire Jon Tuttle, who was fortunately able to name a play that had actually been penned by Miller.
For years, Tony had an inflated green plastic dinosaur hanging from his office ceiling. By the time he retired, it was faded but showed no sign of deflating. I asked Tony if I could have it to hang in the Faculty Lounge, and he gladly donated it. It hangs there now.
In some ways Tony was a dinosaur—a bit larger than life, holding the line on old traditions and standards, skeptical of new fangled technology and teaching, wedded to the old liberal arts values that he and I soaked up at Davidson College. But mostly, Tony’s ideas were new, different, unpredictable, probing, challenging. These are the characteristics that drew our best students to his classes and kept them seated for hours on the pastel blue chair in his office, talking with him beneath the dinosaur, surrounded by the books that Tony loved.
Occasionally I have my poetry students write a "flash poem," a poem drafted quickly on a topic I announce in class on the spur of the moment. Yesterday I took into class my print of James McNeill Whistler's "Arrangement in Gray and Black" and had them write about it. My own flash poem:
